The last few weeks have been a blast! I had the privilege of having some distinguished visitors to Egypt as my house guests. It was wonderful seeing my mom again, it had been since August when I left for London and to return to AUC for the Fall semester. It was also nice to see my friend PaPai again, who I had not seen since August as well. Albeit, it was a bit strange at first to merge my two worlds, but we all had a lot of fun together.
I took them to the Cairo Museum, showed them my school, introduced them to the Cairo Metro system, and took them shopping in Khan el-Khalili.
Also, I wanted to make sure that their visit would be very memorable, so I arranged a cruise on the Nile to see most of the sites in Upper Egypt. We took the train, first class my ass, to Luxor, where we settled onto the boat to begin our expedition. We stopped to see the temples in Edfu and Komombo on our way to Aswan. Upon arriving to Aswan we had to wake up at the crack-of-why-the-hell-am-I-awake to take a tiny micro bus for 5 hours to Abu Simbel. Although my Arabic is quite poor in my opinion, I had some fun serving as a translator to our drivers to and from Abu Simbel. Then, upon returning to Aswan sometime in the afternoon, we got to check out the temple at Philae and the Aswan High Dam. Originally our schedule had us returning to Luxor by train that night, but we opted to stay in Aswan an additional night so we could visit Elephantine, which is awesome, and the beautiful botanical garden on Kitchener’s Island. We then departed on that wonderful train to get back to Luxor. In Luxor we went to the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Hatchepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri, Karnak temple, and Luxor temple. All this was done in one day… For those that don’t know Luxor, it was quite the undertaking. All in all, the whole trip was a blast, the only downside was when my iPod decided to grow legs and run away from my hotel room in Luxor… No more music for Bob 
My mom and PaPai decided that the train was just too unbearable to endure once again, so they decided, and I love them for this, to upgrade us to the sleeper train. After that marvelous experience, I will never go to Luxor without being on the sleeper train again!
Well, after we returned to Cairo, I arranged for my good friend Arto to go with us to Giza so they could see the last standing Wonder of the Ancient World. Then the next day I arranged a day trip. We first went to see the Step Pyramid of Djoser in saqqara, enter the pyramid of Teti, (which has beautiful inscriptions all over the walls), and visit the new Imhotep Museum. I must say, the Imhotep Museum at Saqqara must be the nicest museum in all of Egypt, it was a most enjoyable visit. Next we went to Dashur, where we entered the Red Pyramid, Egypt’s first true pyramid, and took a look at the Bent Pyramid.
The last couple of weeks have been fantastic, I posted about 350 pictures from our trip, I will add more when I can get some from my mom, I hope you all enjoy them.
Also, I want to thank my mom and PaPai for coming all this way to visit with me, I had a great time. (more…)
